Stick a fork in it

2008 has been one of those years you want to hide under the couch and forget about, like a cat hacking up a fresh hairball. On this, the five hundred and thirty-second day of the year, I've had my fill. Enough with the psychopathic Santas, the killer drones, the avuncular ponzi artists, the run-up to the meltdown, the perp-walk of public officials, the apocalyptic weather, and all the other rubble of civilization as we know it. Sheesh!

2008 has been so nasty one of the hottest holiday releases stars a guy in a Nazi uniform wearing an eye patch. Ho ho ho. Don't wait for midnight; bring the ball down in Times Square right now. The sooner 2009 begins, the sooner I'll develop some perspective on 2008. Have an undisgruntled New Year.

Sleep in heavily peace

The building that houses NCPR had its annual Holiday Do today, just in time to save me from a styrobox of Chinese buffet. The theme was winter morale food: fifteen kinds of meat, including my favorite--meat with lard sauce--plus multiple varieties of cheese, differing strengths of chocolate, items from the butter and sugar food groups, stuffed eggs, and a few festive sprigs of vegetable matter--for decoration, one presumes. Many people are going greener, cheaper and simpler this holiday season, at least under the tree. But under the belt, it's still "Laissez les bon temps roulez!"

Ancient wisdom is at work--no, not the scriptures, we're still nasty as ever--but the animal appetites. Winter is coming; store some fat. Things are tough out there; double down with pasta. Who knows when pomegranate chocolate truffles will come round again. Take two? Don't mind if I do. It seems to me that I was heading somewhere pithy and profound with this post, but suddenly, I feel a little sleepy. All the best to you and (yawn) yours, this holiday season.

A Fresh Start on Metaphors

In his Meet the Press interview last week, President Elect Obama expressed the desire that the various reform, financial rescue and economic stimulus plans would result in a "leaner, meaner and more competitive" America. It has long been popular to apply sports and war metaphors to describe the workings of the world of business, and in the last thirty years, to apply them also to the sphere of government. In an extension of the principle "what's good for General Motors is good for America," citizens have become stakeholders who invest via taxation; agencies make war on poverty or drugs. Party campaigns have partisan playbooks; we endeavor to level the playing field, and so forth.

Later on in the same interview, Obama says that "we are all in this together," and that "we will rise or fall as one nation." This is the rhetoric of cooperation, of communal effort and shared destiny. It is, one could say, at "war" with the tone of the preceding paragraph.

If forced to choose sides, I'd have to opt for the tone of the latter. If I was making a poem, I'd prefer to be on my own, duking it out with other poets for pocket change and bragging rights. But in making or remaking a nation--well--it takes a world to make a nation. Our interdependency has never been more clear than during the current financial crisis. This being the case, it might be a winning gambit for the new administration to lose the playbook of Social Darwinism. When times are tough, we are less a nation of players looking to triumph, and more a bunch of people just looking to get by. That calls for a fairer, kinder and more cooperative America, instead.

Acceleration

Sorry about the duplicate LP mailing yesterday. I had set things to send automatically while I was on the road, and forgot to unset them on my return. My to-do list has gotten a little out of hand this week, with the departure of my able assistant Rachel Henderson. She is off to Oklahoma to continue her education. We all miss her, and no one more than I--Who knew how much stuff I had pushed off onto her plate, until all the extra helpings arrived back onto mine?

The holiday season is ramping up at a level of acceleration that drags all the blood to the back of the brain, like flooring a Tesla roadster (holiday giving hint). Despite the economy, I joined in on the Black Friday death march, attacking multiple shopping venues via car and mass transit. Who knows when we will be able to spend with equal abandon again? The nation must agree: the Age of Prosperity Farewell Tour brought retailers a 3% bump over last season. Boston's Downtown Crossing shopping district resounded with the cautionary strains of "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer," but no one was taking the hint. Time enough for a reality-based lifestyle come 2009.

Back to the table

I'm on the road today, bound for Boston, to one of those scaled-down modern Thanksgivings. Instead of using up all the leaves in the old dining room table just to seat the grownups--and a card table or two for the younger kids--we'll be just four. It's the way of the world. In the 1950s, you couldn't throw a rock in Bradford County PA without hitting one of my mom's relations, generations of them clustered around the gentle hills and good soil of the Susquehanna Valley. Same with my father's clan in Indiana.

Since then, decades of jets and cars and jobs have swizzled my family evenly into the long drink of America. Working in countertrend, I have stayed pretty much in one spot for fifty years, but to no avail. You move, they move--it amounts to the same distance.

My sister dropped by the other day with a big box of old family photos. And there they all are again, those missing from the table, the dead and the living, distant in time, distant in place--brought near again in memory--in sepia, in black and white, and color faded as a dream. I sorted out a selection to take on the road, to bring them back again to the family table, where even though the bird may be smaller, the thanks will be as great.

10,000 Hours

I have yet to read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success, but I was fascinated by a recent interview where the author discussed something called the 10,000 Hour Rule, to which he devotes a chapter. He maintains this rule of thumb--to become expert at anything, from arts, to professions to athletics, it requires about 10,000 hours of practice. That would be around 20 hours a week for ten years.

This is bad news for generalists and dilettantes. There aren't that many 10,000 hour chunks available in life. After one has become expert in the disparate skills of sleeping, eating, watching television and driving automobiles from place to place, the windows are few. It has probably taken me all of my 55 years to rack up 10,000 hours of writing--I may still be a little short. But by the rule, you can expect a dramatic improvement in these postings anytime now.

On the other hand, I am close to having my 10,000 hours in on video games that haven't been available for 20 years. They told me then that I was wasting my time. Ya think? And I am close to having 10,000 hours in on playing the guitar, but I'm still kind of lame at it. So one must always account for underlying talent. I definitely have 10,000 hours in on reading science fiction novels, but I search the classifieds in vain for openings that require an expertise in fictional xenosociology. I'll keep practicing; but before turning my hand to something entirely new, I'll keep the rule in mind--tick, tick, tick.

Reliable sources report

As forecast by the Institute for Quantum Bogodynamics at MIT, the recent election was accompanied by a massive uptick in the ambient bogon flux, resulting in an unusual incidence of blather, disinformation and hoaxes throughout infospace. Of note today is the revelation that the source of reports that VP candidate Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent and could not name the nations that comprise North America was a McCain advisor named Martin Eisenstadt (bogus), Sr. Fellow of the Harding Institute (nonexistent). MSNBC ate it up with a spoon.

And they're not alone. Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, the hands within the Eisenstadt sock-puppet, have been taking in bloggers and journalists for over a year. Their creation posted pro-Giuliani campaign rants on YouTube, advocated for a casino in Baghdad's Green Zone, and outed Joe the Plumber as a relative of Charles Keating. Among the egg-faced were the Los Angeles Times, New Republic and Mother Jones.

People are hungry to believe, and never more so than when new "information" reinforces what they already believe. Some people will carry to the grave their belief that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, others that Bush operatives planned 9-11.

We might expect a more skeptical treatment from the press, and to their credit they have quashed some of the most egregious disinformation to blight the political season. But BS receptors seem to be wired into even the brightest of brains. Believe me--I'm a blogger, too.

The change election

However you feel about Barack Obama's election to the presidency on Tuesday, it has answered one question that has been in the back of voter's minds, both supporters and opponents, ever since Obama's emergence onto the national scene 21 months ago--can a majority of Americans really be persuaded to pull the lever to elect an African American to the highest office in the land. Our dismal history of race relations has led many--left, right and middle, as well as black, brown and white--to doubt it. Many thought that we might first see a black president only if a black vice-president came to office through the death of a white president. Many more thought even that scenario unlikely.

This has been (famously) an election about change, change in the future direction of the country. But the results, in my opinion, speak to the change that has already occurred, so gradually over the last decades as to pass unremarked, and so subtly as to defy definition. We have not, of course, been beamed into some kind of post-racial utopia since Tuesday. But we can now point to some evidence for the hopes we harbor--that we can put a pernicious national shame behind us--that a more perfect union is a practical possibility, not just a line in the patriotic catechism. That's what I call change.

Next rest stop

What a difference a week makes. From sun on leaves to snow-flattened lilacs and bent and broken trees. And before another week is out we will have gone through both Halloween and the end of an endless election. Even the time will change (for those who are looking for change) one hour back. The snow will probably go, and maybe come back, too. And the markets might go way down one day, and way up the next. Frankly, I could use a little Dramamine.

When I used to get carsick as a kid, my Mom told me not to look out the side window or down at the road speeding by, but to focus instead on the horizon, to rest my eyes on the long view. Good advice for the nervous tummy. And good advice for the nervous voter, the nervous investor, and the just plain nervous. Just keep it together for the next few miles. Surely there'll be a rest stop soon.

Perfect lack of storm

October has been so sweet. All that sun, all that glorious color. Everything has to come together just right to create such a season. Frost, but not too much, rain enough for healthy color, but not so much as to strip the trees. Snow and wind have to bide their time, too. A perfect lack of storm, one might say. You want to just walk along and kick the leaves a little, head full of nothing.

Such a contrast with the wider world—the bellicose campaign and the deep unease of financial freefall. But then fall has always been the season of cognitive dissonance. You want to revel in it, suck the last beauty from the season's marrow, but know in your own bones how soon the snow will fly. The geese fly, too. Time to bunker up and hunker down, time for the den and the long uneasy watch 'til spring. Snowbird time; get-out-of-Dodge time. Still, the leaves are lambent in the slant afternoon light. Give them their moment while it lasts.